10 Pesos Sputnik

Cuba issued this coin in 2007 to mark the 50th anniversary of Sputnik 1's launch on October 4, 1957. The Soviet satellite completed one orbit every 96 minutes and transmitted its radio signal for 21 days before its batteries failed — a modest engineering achievement by later standards, but one that triggered the full weight of American legislative and military reorientation toward the space race. Cuba's commemorative interest was straightforward: the Soviet Union remained the island's primary ideological and economic patron through that entire period.